immediately have discovered that it did not contain a single letter from a peer. The wording of the advertisement may, therefore, be suspected to have been devised by him to afford a colour for what he must have known was a groundless prosecution. A committee was appointed to investigate the complaint. It met on the 14th of May, and the case would have ended as soon as it was begun, if Pope's spokesman, Lord Hay, who resided at Twickenham, and was one of his associates, had not adduced from a letter to Jervas a passage which he alleged to be a reflection on Lord Burlington. But the person who furnished the work to Curll had, by an elaborate device, provided against a charge which no one except its contriver could have foreseen. The fifty copies, which were sold on the morning of the 12th, before the power of the House of Lords was put in motion, contained the letter. Those which were furnished in the middle of the day, as if to meet the messenger sent to seize them, were all defective, and in every case the letter to Jervas was among the omissions.[43] Nor had the leaves which contained it been simply kept back, but every trace of it had been obliterated by an alteration at the printing-press. In the complete work the missing letter commenced on p. 115 of vol. ii.[44] and ended on p. 117. In the imperfect books a note on Trumbull, which began at p. 114, is carried on to the top of p. 115, and Pope's epitaph upon him, which appears in no other copies of the correspondence, is added to cover a little of the vacant space. The word "Finis" follows the note, though, in spite of this indication that the whole is concluded, the work recommences on p. 117 with the letters to Gay, which continue to p. 154.[45] The coincidence was far too extraordinary to be undesigned. Pope, who had incited the prosecution the very hour the book was published, and who had been in such haste to instruct Lord Hay that the debate in the House of Lords was concluded, and the sheets seized by two o'clock, could alone have adapted one batch to afford a pretext for the proceeding, and another batch to render the proceeding abortive,--he alone could have arranged the delivery of the respective parcels, and sent the fifty copies which contained the obnoxious passage, in time to be sold in the morning, and the one hundred and ninety copies in which it was wanting, just in time to be captured by the messenger from the House of Lords. His object was not to procure the confiscation of the correspondence, and stop the sale. He wished to simulate indignation, and divert suspicion from himself without interfering with the success of the work, and he conducted the prosecution with so much care to ensure defeat that we may readily credit the assertion of Curll, "that the lords declared they had been made Pope's tools."[46]